Previews

Inside Star Trek Online: PvE Content

The first in our three-part series explores Star Trek Online's PvE Content.

Spiffy:

Lots of different kinds of PvE content; painless approach to progression and player-matching.

Iffy:

Will Star Trek Online encounter the same problems with PvE content that plagued Champions?

Welcome to the first of a three-part feature on Cryptic Studios' upcoming Star Trek Online. In this first entry, we'll be tackling how STO handles the story and questing game, aka the PvE (Player versus Environment) content. Check back with us soon for features on the PvP system and on STO's endgame.

Star Trek Online drives content in two different ways. Firstly, it strives to make the player feel that they are taking part in one of the movies or television shows. Secondly, the game will always direct the player along by presenting a variety of content options. The idea is to never have the player come across one of those "what do I do now?" moments that inevitably lead to shelving the game and moving on to more directed (and ultimately more fun) alternatives.

The primary story-driven PvE content comes in the form of Episodes. These should take roughly 45 to 75 minutes per episode and take place across multiple mission maps, offering a mix of both space- and ground-based action.

The five-act dramatic structure is the template behind nearly all of STO's episode designs, just as it was for most of the television shows. While the episodes aren't all structurally built around five different maps, the format provided Cryptic with an easy template to follow, and the episodes should mimic the feel of the shows.

Flexibility is key to how things are structured. The idea is to make all of the technical stuff going on behind the scenes painless, so you never have to worry about player matching, getting locked out of your missions, and so on. You can always rejoin an episode if you leave before it's done, even if you jumped into an episode to help someone else. If they leave, it still works for you. You may not get credit for your personal mission, but there's no need to kick you out if someone leaves. In fact, there's a whole system of secondary mission rewards in place to provide incentives for players to replay story content while helping others.

At any given time you're free to set the main story aside and just do some exploring, which is where Cryptic's Genesis System comes into play. Genesis procedurally generated thousands of maps, including terrain, system maps, interiors, and so on. The idea here was to create the feeling that you'd never visit the same place twice while trekkin' through the vastness of space. Episodes have their fair share of conflict written into the storylines, so exploration content goes after the other feel of Star Trek, the part that isn't always about phasers and bloodshed. If you remember the episodes where the captain would help local populations with their problems, you have the right idea.